To the reader

Meanness, blame, stupidity, error,
Strive our souls and undermine our bodies
And, as the beggars feed their lice,
We complacent nourish our remorse.

Stubborn in the sins, lax in the purposes,
We make ourselves be amply paid for what it was confessed
And we happily come back to the muddy road
Believing we wipe away our faults in vile tears.

In the pillow of evil, Satan Trimegisto¹
Patiently cradles our enchanted spirit
and the precious metal of our will,
it is entirely evaporated by the work of that chemist.

The Devil is who handles the threads that move us!
We find charm in sordid objects
And, undaunted, surrounded of stinky darkness,
We daily go down a step toward Hell.

Like the debauchee that kisses and nibbles
The lacerated breast of an old prostitute,
If the time is right for clandestine pleasure
We strongly squeeze it as dry orange.

Dense and swarmy, as one million helmintos²,
A crowd of demons dances in our heads
And, when we breathe, Death in our lungs
Descends as invisible river, with a deaf moan.

If the poison, the knife, the fire, the rape,
Did not adorn yet with their strange drawings
The dull canvas of our bad luck,
It is because our spirit was not quite daring.

But, between the jackals, the panthers, the lynxs,
The apes, the serpents, scorpions and vultures,
The yelping monsters, sibilant and grunting,
In the infernal mixture of our vices

There is one more evil, murkier and dirty than the others!
That without ugly grimaces neither great shouts
Would convert with pleasure the land into rubbish
And, in the middle of a yawn, would devour the Orb;

It is Boredom! - Bathed in an involuntary weeping,
It imagines scaffolds, while smokes its grass.
Reader, you know well to this delicate monster,
- Hypocrite reader - my fellow -, my brother!